The sordid, inevitable result of a generation reared on 24/7 access to vile porn
IT could pass for any modern office building, the HQ of some big tech company or the regional base of an international accountancy firm. Once you enter through the black gated railings, and check your bags in the security scanner at the door, Laganside Courts feels like any 21st century workspace – all glass and steel and pale wood with casually-dressed staff going about their duties or chatting in the mezzanine-style corridors.
At the information desk in the hall, the receptionist barely looks up when you ask directions to Court Number 12, and she points out the lifts to the fourth floor. There is no clue, in your surroundings, that this building is busily processing all manner of human misery, shame, fear and depredation behind the closed doors of its various theatres. Courts are a peculiar mix of tedium and tension at the best of times, an unsettling axis of modern efficiencies and arcane observances, but never more so than when a serious criminal trial is in progress. The lift that takes you to the fourth floor, and Court 12 and a rape case that has gripped the entire country, also takes you back a hundred years.
Inside, behind the glass screen that divides the spectators in the public gallery from the body of the court, a young man in a blue sweater and an open-necked shirt sits alone in the elevated witness box. He is positioned to face the jurors on the other side of the room, eight men and three women, none of them contemporaries of the young man in the box. On a higher level again sits the judge, wearing a horsehair wig and a black gown trimmed in red and purple. Before her are ranged the legal teams, solicitors and juniors seated behind the five bewigged and gowned QCs, all of them middle-aged gentlemen.
IN the box, the young man is describing an incident of almost unendurably graphic sexual activity. He does so in a manner so calm and almost blasé that it is difficult to reconcile the content with the delivery. He is embarrassed, for sure, to be describing such events in such intimate detail, because his parents and his little sister are sitting in the public gallery while, behind them, a group of women who look like a book club on a day out are sharing Polo mints and loud commentaries. Even the QCs, you can tell, are struggling to find precedents in their cloth-bound textbooks, and their traditional courtroom feints of sarcasm, outrage or indignation sound feeble in the circumstances.
Paddy Jackson, patiently explaining the variable constituents of a ‘spit-roast’ to a plummy-voiced British QC in 18th-century garb, is a product of the 21st-century smartphone generation. He and his peers were perhaps the first teens to have had unchecked access to the internet, after smartphones arrived in 2007, and to have had their expecta- tions and interactions shaped by exposure to material their parents still can’t comprehend. And now he sits in the witness box of a trial run on centuriesold principles, politely trying to align his version of normality with the obtuse prudishness of a bunch of elderly blokes in fancy dress. It is patently, depressingly, despairingly clear that he doesn’t believe there was anything wrong with his behaviour.
And, according to the law and to the verdict of the 11member jury, he did nothing wrong. Rape defendants rarely take the stand in their own defence and the bewildered casualness with which Jackson and his co-accused explained themselves meant that there simply had to be a reasonable doubt about their criminal intent. This sort of behaviour – threesomes, spit roasts, random hook-ups where you don’t even bother to ask the other person’s name – emerged as entirely commonplace within their peer group. So what was on trial, in Laganside Crown Court over the past nine weeks, was not just a group of swaggering rugby players and their drunken, louche sexual antics on a fairly routine night out. It was the culture manifest by their expectations, and the culpability of the wider society that has turned a blind eye until now.
Shortly after he began his evidence, Mr Jackson’s QC asked for a piece of CCTV footage to be replayed to the court. It was clip from Ollie’s Nightclub, the venue where he and his pals had pitched up in the early hours of June 28, 2016. He’d just returned from a fiveweek rugby tour, and touched down from a red-eye flight, that Monday morning, dropped his bags and went straight out to party with his friends. At 3 o’clock the following morning, after consuming perhaps two dozen units of alcohol, he was caught on the CCTV leaving the club. In the few seconds it took him to walk past the cameras, a pretty dark haired girl approached him. She put her arms around him, and snuggled in for a selfie. Did you know this girl? No. Does this happen often? Yes. He’s a wellknown rugby star, a celebrity, a nice-looking young man with a profile and a lucrative career. Women fling themselves at him all the time. Next question.
HE’D been looking forward, he said, to getting back to his own bed after five weeks away but was cool with his friends’ plans to continue the party in his home – he was the only one among them with his own place. Four girls whom he didn’t know came back, in a couple of taxis, with himself and his friends. In his kitchen, later, he noticed the complainant staring at him, and she began chatting and flirting and stroking his arm. It was clear she liked him, he said, and, with incongruous naivety, ‘I liked her back’.
He went to his bedroom in the hope she’d follow him and, he said, she did. They began kissing on the end of his bed, but she stopped and asked if he knew her name. When he said he didn’t she took a huff, and went back downstairs. He
reckoned that was the end of their encounter but back in the kitchen, he said, she began paying him attention again. He went back upstairs, again in the hope she’d follow him, and she did. This time, their kissing became more intense, she bit his lip so hard his eyes watered but he didn’t want to complain, and they had oral sex.
She’d told the court that she’d returned to his bedroom to retrieve her clutch bag, after their first session, when he followed her and forced himself upon her. When his friend Stuart Olding walked in on the scene, she insisted, Jackson invited him to join them but, in the accused men’s evidence, she was the one who beckoned Olding forward. He didn’t deny, though, that he’d gestured cheerfully towards the woman, when Olding came in to the bedroom and lingered to watch. They both insisted, and the jury believed, that the young woman was a willing participant in the threesome that followed, when Olding lay back against the headboard and Jackson, at the other end, penetrated her as she performed oral sex on his friend.
Perhaps the most crucial and, to an older generation stunned by the implications of this scene, the most extraordinary turn of events happened when another of the young women, Dara Florence, opened the door and looked in. Like Olding, she also lingered for a few seconds, rather than excusing herself in embarrassment for interrupting.
She maintains that Jackson invited her to join them, and she declined. She went downstairs and, giggling, reported that she’d just witnessed a threesome. Blane McIlroy then texted Jackson to ask if there was any chance of his joining in. This is sex as Scrabble: this is plainly the norm for a generation who engage in anonymous and ultra-casual sexual encounters, in the winding-down hours of a mid-week party, in the same way that their parents’ generation played board games.
And this was the single scenario that cast a reasonable doubt upon the claimant’s case: If these two guys were busily raping and subduing a terrified woman, would they really have invited a total stranger to join in? And what did that invitation say about the kind of behaviour that was commonplace in their milieu? Once Dara Florence, who had no loyalties to any of the participants, had given her evidence then the prosecution’s case was lost.
And the behaviour of the four accused, over the following few days, further undermined the allegation that they believed they’d done anything wrong. Jackson slept on the same blood-stained bed sheets until the police collected them for forensic evidence. They met in a small café, next day, to compare notes about their night. They bragged about their spit-roasting activities on social media. They went out partying for the rest of the week. Jackson was in the middle of ordering a breakfast pancake, in the mid-afternoon of the following Thursday, when he got a call telling him to get himself a lawyer. Asked what he’d done on the morning after the alleged rape, after the complainant had left in a taxi at around 5am, Jackson casually mentioned that Stuart had repaired to the bedroom next door with another of the girls, and he ‘went in’ to them. And if it was to deliver a cup of tea and a slice of toast to the pair in the bed, he didn’t make that clear…
THE message that came through, unmistakably, from the evidence of all four men was that this sort of activity – the heavy drinking, the group sex with unnamed and forgettable women, the subsequent bragging – is their version of normal. And if the complainant was horrified by these attitudes and these expectations, it sounds very much as if that makes her a rarity amongst young women of her generation. Multiple sexual partners on a single night, multiple pairings in the same room at the same time, no names, no details, no phone-numbers – after engaging in the most intimate possible conduct with the complainant, Jackson didn’t even bother to walk her to his door or find her a taxi home – this is their world. These are the porn-fed fantasies that privileged young men expect to have made flesh, and that young women expect to have to fulfil. These are the scenes they have been watching on their smartphones and their tablets for so long that the lines of human decency and personal integrity have been fully erased: women are commodities, pieces of meat, waxed and tanned and toned and dressed like porn stars and expected to be just as compliant. Women’s bodies deserve no more regard than a urinal – you and your mates gather round, all lads together, relieve yourselves upon them, and then you zip yourself up and you walk away.
And these expectations are whetted by other girls as much as by the men: this is what we do, this is what’s cool. Last year, I took part in a seminar on internet safety for teens, and when the subject of ‘revenge porn’ came up, I said I gave my own girls a very simple piece of advice: if you want to prevent a vengeful ex posting your nude images on line, then don’t share them in the first place. A young woman in the audience put up her hand. She was a spokeswoman for secondary school pupils, she said, and I was victim shaming. If young girls want to send nude pictures of themselves to boys, that was their right. I left the seminar deeply depressed. This is the message vulnerable and uncertain kids are getting from their peers, at 13 and 14 years of age, that their young bodies are porn-fodder. Now imagine the messages they’re getting at 19.
Even though the jury doubted her story, there is no doubt that something happened that night to make that young woman take the course she took. Something happened that made her willing to withstand eight days in the witness box, and the intense crossexamination of four male barristers. The defence insisted that it was Dara Florence’s arrival that was the gamechanger, that the complainant knew she had been rumbled, even feared she might have been recorded on a mobile phone, and only then protested her reluctance. That’s certainly a possibility – other girls known to have been involved in ‘spit roasting’ incidents with sportsmen have had their lives destroyed as a result. But it’s equally possible that, at some stage, she realised that she was indeed a piece of meat, an anonymous body, a disposable receptacle, and that felt like too great a violation to bear. It wasn’t the men’s aggression or menace that distressed her, perhaps – it was the offensive casualness of their expectation that she would perform for their pleasure, then get her kit on and make her own way home without even the courtesy of a goodbye.
IBELIEVE we will see two outcomes from this case, one good and one bad. The bad consequence is that rape victims, in future, will be far more reluctant to come forward and suffer what that young woman had to face. Earlier this year, we reproached ourselves, as a nation, with the experiences of Joanne Hayes more than 30 years ago. Wrongly accused of murdering a baby, she was then subject to the most embarrassing and intrusive of questioning from a parade of male barristers, her private life and even her private parts all fair game for their enquiries.
And yet, in 2018, a young woman accused of nothing is subject to an equally harrowing ordeal, again being quizzed by a succession of male barristers, being handed her underwear and asked to explain stains, being quizzed about injuries to her genitalia, being grilled over her grooming and her tan and her alcohol consumption. There simply has to be a better way to try sexual abuse cases than trial by endurance and humiliation.
The second consequence, the more positive one, is that this case might perhaps make young men – and indeed some young women – reconsider the behaviour they have come to view as normal. Human beings are not merely the sum of their available orifices, to be used and discarded at will, and sooner or later there is a price to be paid for treating them as objects. Loading up on 20 drinks, on night out, is not normal or healthy. Sharing sexual encounters with your friends, as if you were playing a party game, is morally corrosive and soul-crushing. Women may comply with these activities, but pornographic tableaux where they are the meat in a sandwich are rarely a female fantasy, and their consent may well be – as Judge Patricia Smyth suggested in her summing up – reluctant at best. It’s still consent, of course, as this case proved. But if the prospect of this awful scenario, of a nine-week trial, of families humiliated and exposed, of careers and prospects ruined, of reputations sullied, is enough to make certain young people rethink their version of normality, it will have been of some bleak worth.